Nicholas Huckle Translates French Art Historian’s Letters
Nicholas Huckle, Master Lecturer in French, is translating from the French a number of letters written by the art historian Hubert Damisch, penned to the American art historian Meyer Schapiro. These letters, part of a long-running correspondence between the two well-known academics (Schapiro wrote to Damisch in English), date from the early 1970s. They cover mostly Damisch’s time spent as a fellow of the Society for the Humanities at Cornell, and they make particular reference to a lecture Damisch gave there, “Sign/or/sigm: Freud and the name of Signorelli.”
Our own Jeffrey Mehlman was at Cornell at the time. He attended that lecture, and he is mentioned in the correspondence: “There is also Jeffrey Mehlman, an assistant professor in the French department, whom I had met before in Paris. He is a specialist on Lacan (of whom he is a translator), and on Lévi-Strauss (the subject of his thesis); he has a brilliant mind, and is also very personable and engaging company”!
The translated letters will appear in the Winter 2019 issue of OCTOBER, along with two other pieces that Nick has translated: a previously untranslated article by Damisch and an introduction composed by Jérémie Koering.